Tea at Trianon: The Long Decline in the Middle

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, September 1, 2022

The Long Decline in the Middle

From Tom Piatak at Chronicles:

A graph making the rounds on Twitter shows that, since 1970, the share of aggregate national income held by the middle class has plummeted while the share held by the rich has skyrocketed and the share held by the lower class has barely budged. I do not know if this graph has all the particulars right, but its thrust is undoubtedly correct. The decades-long decline of the once-great American middle class is the overarching political reality that the professional conservative movement has spent decades ignoring, obfuscating, and even celebrating.

At about the same time, I came upon an illuminating interview of financial journalist David Gelles by David Leonhardt in The New York Times. Gelles has written a book about the impact of longtime General Electric Chief Executive Jack Welch on the American economy. Welch, who took the reins at GE in 1981, was held up as the model CEO for decades, and many lesser CEOs took their cues accordingly. Welch’s overall approach is neatly summed up in his quip that he wished all GE’s plants were on barges so that he could ship them at a moment’s notice to whatever dismal spot on the planet then had the lowest labor costs. He’d need just enough infrastructure to allow GE to build its goods there and then to bring them back, tariff-free, to sell to Americans.

I never understood the adulation for Welch because I thought what he was doing was, at worst, economic treason and, at best, a renunciation of all the non-economic ties that used to bind companies to communities. As the article noted, Welch “unleashed a wave of mass layoffs and factory closures that other companies followed.”

Before Welch, layoffs were seen as a last resort, a triage measure to save money in a company that was otherwise going to fail. After Welch, layoffs became an accepted way of boosting profits, even at companies that were not in distress. Plants began to close, and jobs got shipped overseas with no concern for anything other than the short-term impact on the bottom line. Most of the profits at GE went to big investors in the form of stock buybacks rather than toward increased wages for workers, improved factories and equipment, or expansion in research and development. (Read more.)